The Middle East

Egypt's pope

Habemus baba

Nov 5th 2012, 17:36by M.R. | CAIRO

THE moment lacked the dramatic intensity of Tahrir Square at the end of Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year reign. But for Egypt’s 8m Coptic Christians, the announcement on Sunday morning of a new pope—or Baba in Arabic—marked an equally crucial turning point. It was strong on drama, too. As roving cameras stirred the incense in Cairo’s cavernous Cathedral of St Mark, and the 2,500-strong congregation held a collective breath, a blindfolded altar-boy plucked one of three glass spheres, each containing the name of a papal finalist, from a crystal chalice. With trembling hands, a lushly bearded and robed bishop opened the ball, removed the slip of paper inside, unfolded it and raised it triumphantly for the crowd to see. The choir kicked up a rousing chant of kyrie eleison—Lord, Have Mercy—and the smiling face of the new patriarch, Tawadros II, the 118th in the Egyptian church’s long history, appeared on a giant screen.

The elaborate ceremony, with its hint of divine intervention, has brought a much-needed rush of hope to what is by far the largest Christian denomination in the Middle East. The Coptic Church, one of the world’s oldest, has suffered increasing woes in recent years. Ugly sectarian attacks over the past decade have left dozens of Egyptian Christians dead, a score of churches vandalised, and isolated Christian communities feeling fearful. Understandably, their worries have grown with the post-revolutionary rise in influence of Islamist forces, such as the Muslim Brotherhood to which Egypt’s newly elected president, Muhammad Morsi, belongs. Despite soothing words from Brotherhood figures, the Egyptian state’s serial failure to cope with sectarian tensions has led to growing disgruntlement, and a surge in already high levels of emigration among Copts.

But the church has suffered from internal troubles, too. The previous patriarch, Pope Shenouda III, who died last March at the age of 88 following a long illness, had led his flock for 41 years, a full decade longer than Mr Mubarak lingered as Egypt’s president. A doctrinally conservative populist, Shenouda ran the church in a secretive, centralised manner that often seemed to parallel Mr Mubarak’s style of rule. Dissidents found themselves chastised or banished. The church itself monopolised relations with the state. Marginalising the influence of lay Christians and leveraging political support for the regime in exchange for parochial favours, Shenouda became, in effect, the sole spokesman for the Copts. This led to uncomfortable disjunctures. Despite the bombing of a church in Alexandria that killed 24 people in January, 2011 (and for which no culprit has yet been found), Shenouda loudly reiterated Coptic backing for Mr Mubarak right to the day of his fall, a month later. Since the revolution, the church has been adrift, responding feebly even to such challenges as an incident last October when soldiers ploughed heavy armoured vehicles into a crowd of Christian protestors, crushing many to death. Yet by and large, Copts have tended to mute criticism of the church in the belief that it remained their protector of last resort.

The six-month-long process of choosing Shenouda’s successor seems to have done much to reinvigorate the church. A first elimination phase, which saw an initial field of 15 candidates approved by the church whittled down to five, allowed petitioners to file thousands of complaints. Many of these proved to be directed at Shenouda’s closest associates in the church hierarchy, some of whom were criticised for alleged ties to Mr Mubarak’s security services, or for holding provocatively sectarian views. A group of 2,400 electors, half from the broader Coptic community and including representatives from overseas dioceses, then voted for the final three, with Tawadros, whose name is an Egyptian form of Theodorus, selected in the end by chance. The relative transparency and inclusiveness of the whole business, combined with the choice of Tawadros, seem to have brought general satisfaction. With a university degree in pharmacology, the new pope is reasonably worldly, and at 60—his birthday fell on the day of his elevation to the patriarchate—he is relatively young. The satisfaction may be even more complete if, as promised, Egypt’s president takes up an invitation to attend the formal investiture of Tawadros, in two weeks’ time.